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Re:Stephen Hawking Says We Should Really Be Scared of Capita... by jokoon on Sunday March 06, 2016 @06:22AM (#11233337)
Not even reading this, but personally I'm more concerned about social darwinism, meaning the idea some people have, where the strongest should naturally dominate the weak in a societal context, just like it happens in nature. There will always be this idea that people who might starve, should starve.

I'm more scared about the ideological aspects of anarcho capitalism, which seems to be embedded in the libertarian ideology. Basically it would imagine a society without state or authority, which to me is the return to an uncivilized world.

So the knot here seems to be about basic income (based on Friedman's negative income tax), and how it would be financed. Somehow it seems to boil down to the problems talked about by Marx, which are about the means of production. Except now, the means of production require so little labor, but I still think Marx is relevant here.

I'm sure politically it's currently almost impossible to make companies give money back to non-contributing citizens in a form of taxes, especially in the US. But ultimately, that's where all the money will be, and I don't think special interests will always be able to argue to not give back.

Re:Stephen Hawking Says We Should Really Be Scared of Capita... by rms_returns on Sunday March 06, 2016 @07:11AM (#11233502)
> Basically it would imagine a society without state or authority, which to me is the return to an uncivilized world.

That will be the case ONLY IF absolute power comes in the hands of one or few individuals (or capitalists). Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Hence, in an ideal world, there should be no state authority, but the authority/power should be DECENTRALIZED within a vast number of individuals not a single or few capitalists with vested interest.

I'm a Software Developer and as an implementation of this decentralization, I can think of open source projects. In large open source projects like Linux or Debian or Java, one might imagine that a few elite programmers can control everything like you say. But there is no return to the uncivilized world, because the power to influence the development is decentralized into millions of contributers, testers, security researchers and auditors across the world! As Eric Raymond says in on of his famous writings, "if there are enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". I think this same aphorism applies to the real world too if you replace bugs with general societal problems.